August 2014

August 21, 2014

Well, no shit, Sherlock. Ferguson is small - 6.2 square miles, 21,000 people. St. Louis County is 524 square miles, and 1,000,000 people. If you live a mile outside of the Ferguson town limits, why would you say, "I don't live in Ferguson - this has nothing to do with me"? The vast majority of people who live within 10 miles of where Mike Brown was killed, don't live in Ferguson.

August 20, 2014

I haven't commented on Ferguson, because Lord knows I don't have anything to say that hasn't already been said repeatedly. But other killings of civilians by police prior to that had put a simple idea in my head: cops who kill or shoot unarmed civilians should be fired. And now seems like an excellent time to propose this plan.

Completely aside from any possible criminal charges, if a law enforcement officer shoots an unarmed person (or kills by other means) except in clear self-defense, that should be the end of his career in law enforcement.

While this would be no substitute for criminal charges, if such a policy were implemented nationwide, it would give police a pretty strong incentive to not shoot people without need.

So let's make it nationwide. Next time we have a Congress that will pass sensible legislation, it should pass a law that:

1) Requires the Department of Justice to maintain a database of all instances where a U.S. law enforcement officer of any kind shoots anyone, or kills or seriously injures anyone by other means than guns, and flags those cases where the person killed or injured was unarmed at the time, giving the names of the officer or officers involved.

2) Requires that any law enforcement agency receiving any Federal aid, directly or indirectly, report all such cases to the DoJ.

3) Requires that any law enforcement agency receiving any Federal aid, directly or indirectly, that employs an officer who is on the list of flagged cases in (1), either demonstrate in an administrative proceeding for that purpose that the preponderance of the evidence shows that the officer was acting in legitimate self-defense, or cease their employment of said officer. Failure to do so would result in loss of Federal aid and the benefits of ongoing coordination with Federal law enforcement agencies. Persons representing the injured person, or the survivors of the deceased, would be permitted to argue and produce evidence to the effect that the killed or injured person had not required the officer to shoot or kill in self-defense.

4) An officer who was exonerated by such a proceeding would no longer be flagged on the DoJ database. An officer who was subject to such a proceeding who was not shown to have acted in appropriate self-defense, would be barred for life from law enforcement work. An officer who shot an unarmed person whose employment was terminated by his police department rather than have to justify his actions in such a proceeding would have go through such a proceeding on his own initiative before being employed by another law enforcement agency.

This would put the burden on the police departments to either get rid of an officer who killed, or demonstrate in a formal proceeding that the officer was acting reasonably. If such a plan were in place, I bet we'd see a significant drop in the number of people killed by police each year.

August 03, 2014

The thought crossed my mind the other day that our job situation was like a game of Musical Chairs. The music plays, and when it stops, everybody tries to sit down, but there aren't enough chairs, so a few people are without seats, and lose.

Conservatives say to the losers, "it's your fault that you didn't get a seat."

So if we made paid leave a right, as we damn well should (and I ask, yet one more time, why is the Democratic Party totally MIA on this issue?!), how could we make it applicable to part-timers?

That's easy, actually: just write the law so that workers get at least one hour of paid leave for every X hours of paid work.

For instance, if you want to give every full-time worker two weeks' paid vacation, that's one hour of leave for every 25 hours of work. Scaling up to the year, that's 2000 hours of work and 80 hours of leave, or 50 forty-hour weeks of work and two weeks' vacation.

But if you're a part-timer, working 12 hours one week, 24 hours the next, 18 the next, and so forth, then you would accrue an hour of paid leave every 25th hour you work for a given employer. In the example above, the worker would have accrued her second hour of paid leave 14 hours into Day 3.

The same thing could (and should) be done with sick leave, if we ever write that into the law as well.

Under Section 3 of Article II, the President “may, on extraordinary Occasions, convene both Houses, or either of them…”

I think it would be hilarious if Obama called the House of Representatives back into session, and told them that they would remain in session until they passed a bill addressing the border crisis. No vacation for you, parliament of crazies!

And besides being hilarious, it would be a hell of a good idea. The President would be rubbing in the fact that Congress isn't doing its job, and he's the grownup who is telling them: no, you can't go play outside until you clean up your room! And this would get the sort of play in the news that would help it sink in with the American public that we have a responsible President, and a House of irresponsible children.

The Republicans would play into it perfectly, too, by throwing a huge tantrum.

Do it, Mr. President. Call the House back into session. Do it now.

UPDATE: As it turned out, the House stayed around until Friday night and passed an 'immigration' bill, though a better phrase to describe it would be "deportation bill."

Quote stolen from Paul Simon off the Graceland album. And it pretty much describes this month's jobs numbers. Seasonally adjusted, we added 209,000 jobs from June, and June and May were adjusted upward by 15,000, for a total gain of 224,000. Not bad, but not big either.

But if we add up the last six months, we've gained just shy of 1.5 million jobs since January, which is actually decent job growth even by pre-recession standards. (Not great, but decent. Enough to start making a difference, if we could get another year of this.) We're just about equal with the best period of job growth during the Bush years, though what that really tells you is how anemic job growth had been during the Bush years, even before the Great Recession hit.

So this past month could have been better, but it could have been a lot worse. And maybe, just maybe, we're starting to get some sort of virtuous cycle going here, where enough people are getting back to work and spending money to put more people back to work.

It's way the hell overdue, and it's definitely in spite of the GOP's best efforts to sabotage our economy, but better late than never. I'll be knocking on wood and keeping my fingers crossed.